How did this actually get underway? And so my grandfather would work there during the day. My father would come up when he got off work at Broyhill Furniture and work on weekends. And they started making these little cedar chests and cedar wardrobes. So he built these cedar wardrobes — solid cedar. He would actually drive over into Tennessee and up through Ohio and Kentucky to buy the cedar.
And once the company got started, he would go on buying trips to buy the lumber. So my mother used to tell a lot of stories about going on lumber-buying trips.
And those trips were one of the things that got him going in a different direction; I think it was around He was still making cedar wardrobes and cedar chests. But one of his good friends, George Cartledge, from retailer Grand Piano in Roanoke, Virginia they were contemporaries and became best buddies … and he called my dad one day and said — they called him Wade; his formal name was J.
Wade Kincaid. Lea company, predecessor to Lea Industries. And so Mr. Cartledge called people at Rhodes and Havertys.
He called five or six different people himself. So my father showed him this commitment to buy the bedroom furniture, so Mr. Halfacre started to loan him the money to buy the equipment and the lumber.
Back in those days, you had furniture distributors like R. So instead of having his own sales force, he would just use these distributors to sell it for him.
How did he meet these distributors? Did he come in contact with them when he was at Broyhill? He was years old and lived up in West Jefferson, North Carolina. Was that part of the agreement? That was the same price that the David M. There was a shortage of furniture at that period of time, and so my father made it because the supply was not there from David M. But once he started selling furniture to these guys, he developed a relationship with them as well.
He just did not think that good furniture was made of anything but solid wood components. That was his philosophy. We carry the same philosophy today, that we still make only solid-wood furniture at Kincaid. Do you remember visiting the plant as a toddler or as a very young person? With 10 children, you only got three or four that were kind of the same age.
But my memories were when I was probably 4 or 5 or 6 years old. But that was my first memory of the market, I guess.
You all did fun things, went down to the lake shore, I assume? He was a baseball player, and his whole life, he played baseball.
Actually, even when he was in the eighth grade, the colleges were scouting him because he was a great pitcher. So he always had a great affinity for baseball. And in the daytime, my mom would take us to the museums and zoos and other places. So we had a good time. Well, he had all these children. He started working in the factory, and he never really did that. How did your mother and father meet? Your father started out as a grocer before joining Broyhill, I assume.
Do you remember the first time you went to the furniture plant as a kid? My father had built a big lake with a community center building for the community of Hudson, for the Boy Scouts and all the churches to use. So I was around the factory my whole life. When I was about 10 years old, I would go over on Saturday mornings. Back then, we worked 5 and a half days a week, so Saturday morning was a workday.
That was my job. He paid me to sweep the warehouse. Did you ever wander into the plant? I spent my early days around the warehouse and loading dock — pretty basic things, I guess. Loading trucks. Every summer, I would come home, even when I was in college. I was expected to come home and go to work in one of the factories. That was very fortunate because I had a chance to work in every department in the furniture factories.
So it helped me gain a little bit of knowledge about how to make furniture. I'm surely not an expert, but at least I kinda knew what piece of equipment performed what kind of operations, so that was very beneficial. Were you the first generation of your family to go to college?
So I was the first boy to go to college and graduate. Back then, it was just normal to go into the business. When you got out of high school, you just went right to work in the family business. I had applied to N. State University because they had the furniture manufacturing program. I went to Appalachian. At that point, it was a state teachers college. Through the industrial arts department, they had the basics on how to build stuff.
So I did that for about a year, but I realized that really was not my forte. And I would have never really succeeded at N. State because that was more of an engineering-based manufacturing program. I kind of gravitated more to the business side of it, and so I switched majors at Appalachian and got into business administration. So that was probably a good move for me. So I was in there working with these very talented people, and they were building beautiful furniture, and my stuff looked like workshop stuff.
So I realized at that point that this was not my skill set. So I got out of that and headed to business. I wanted to go ahead and be a sales rep because my father had told me early on that you make more money being a sales rep than anything in the furniture business.
My brother was a sales rep in North Carolina for the company — that was his territory. But it was kind of funny because I had six months before my departure date from when I got out of school, so I spent that six months in my territory. My brother was very gracious. He gave me everything in western North Carolina, west of what is now Interstate 77, Statesville west, excluding Charlotte and Asheville. He kept the big cities to himself, so I had the little, small mom-and-pop stores.
So I spent that six months visiting those stores and building relationships with them. We wanted to spread ourselves westward. At that time, we were selling Montgomery Ward, who was our largest customer, and we had these distributors around the country. So my brother and I took over all the sales west of the Mississippi. We would take turns, with about every three weeks one of us going out and just flying all over the country, whether it be California or Texas or Colorado, selling furniture to those folks out there.
Most of them had some other product lines. I assume the capacity had grown substantially. It was a dining room facility. I started working in with my brother. I was traveling with him down in eastern North Carolina, and we checked into a motel called the Heart of Wilson in Wilson, North Carolina.
That was the name of the motel. And the first thing you do when you get in a room is you put the television on. My brother and I were staying together. And this would have had to be in late So I put the television on, and all the sudden we saw a large fire, and they were showing this news coverage of this big fire.
A TV crew from Charlotte had come up, and they were televising the fire. So after that he moved those operations back up to Hudson and added another facility there. No one was injured, so it was not that kind of a loss. He obviously lost his dining room capacity for a short period of time, anyway, but was able to recover fairly quickly, I assume.
You found it suitable for you? Yes, I did. My father gave me some advice. Of course, he had only an eighth-grade education, but he had a lot of common sense, so I kind of borrowed a lot of that from him, I guess. Most of the time back then we ate steak and potatoes almost every night. You stayed at a Holiday Inn, and you ate steak. But I enjoyed it. It was very beneficial to me, and so I enjoyed that period. Were there certain independents that really became standout retailers and close friends?
And still are today. But I remember calling on Bill Child and R. Willey in Utah. Bill was a bedroom buyer then. A lot of those folks are gone. A lot of those people I originally called on are no longer in business today.
The ones that hung around are pretty successful, I guess, by this point. But I enjoyed that a lot. What made you a successful sales rep? What were you offering? All of your competitors were domestic manufacturers, and you knew who they were. We specialized in Early American solid-wood furniture.
That was our niche, and we were pretty good at that. Leo was a retailer. I still remember his sales pitch. But Leo was very close to the Ethan Allen people.
They had one of the first Ethan Allen in-store galleries. And at that point, Ethan Allen was the expert in Colonial furniture, and their furniture was solid wood. He was an interesting gentleman.
He escaped from Germany when he was 19 years old. He was in Nazi Germany, and he came over here with no money and got in the furniture business and became very successful. He and my father became the best of friends. What did he become at Kincaid, VP of marketing?
VP of sales was everything at that point. He really taught me more about the marketing and merchandising and sales part of it than anyone. My father was a manufacturer. He kind of turned all of that over to Leo.
My father loved the employees. He would walk through the factories. So he handed the selling over to the rest of us at that point. In those days, you would see the trends, and if you saw someone like a Henredon come out with some style — they were the very high end — then maybe Thomasville would interpret it, and then somebody below them would interpret it, and then we would interpret it. But we would kind of see what was happening out in the marketplace.
The people we competed with back then were people like Williams Furniture. American Drew, which is now part of La-Z-Boy. We had Crawford. A lot of the New England guys were still…. Keller was a competitor. So there were a group of companies, but you knew everyone, and you knew what they were producing, and everyone kind of stayed in their own niche, and so it was a simpler time before the imports came and changed the marketplace.
Were you mid-priced? Lower mid-priced? We positioned ourselves above Broyhill. The pitch was that it was solid-wood furniture at the same price as veneers. That was the pitch. We would hand out pieces of veneer. And we were a great value. We were very efficient. We always invested a lot of money back into the operation. My father was not one of these owners that lived a high life off of the company. All the profits we made he put back into the operations.
He was always buying new and better equipment and more factories. Grow the business. I assume you were part of the High Point Market, but in the western part of the market, not in High Point itself. Well, my first memories — and I think I was maybe 18 years old or My father had a small showroom at our factory in Hudson.
And I say small. It was 2, square feet small. So my father had to show there at the factory, and he would schedule dealers to come from High Point up to Hudson to look at his furniture. I think today about letting my year-old son drive our customers miles! And that was before the interstate system. We came down Highway I remember doing that.
And then I guess the Hickory Furniture Mart eventually got some of the smaller companies in that showroom building out there. But most of the big companies had their own factory showrooms. And back then we had premarket, and we wanted to be able to do premarket, and get the key retailers to come to our factories about a month before the actual market. It certainly was much more relaxed than it is today.
But we never really showed in Hickory. We went from the factory showroom in Hudson to High Point, into the main building down there. I remember one of the first things we did Leo had a lot of friends in the industry, and of course he was Jewish. At that time, it was very hard to get kosher food in High Point — or any kind of food in the main building. We had the Dogwood Room down on the bottom level, and then the hospital auxiliary groups would sell sandwiches on the bridges between the building sections.
Those were your food choices in the building. And the folks loved them. But the closet had no ventilation, so the entire showroom smelled of this garlicky concoction. Anyway, that became a tradition: the Kincaid Hot Dog. Where else were you showing? We came out when everyone else did and came to High Point as the major market.
But we had showrooms in New York at that point. We had showrooms later on in Dallas, Atlanta and San Francisco. So we were basically in all of those different markets at various times. We expanded into occasional furniture, and then we expanded into dining room, and that meant we needed more factories.
So we were pretty much always at full capacity. In that time period, skilled labor was very hard to come by. So we actually had a guarantee for all of the supervisors and even the skilled people at the factory. We would guarantee them a hour workweek. We would guarantee them 10 hours of overtime to get them to come join us.
I remember going to market, and we brought out one maple corner cabinet. That was the entire market introduction. We had our own fleet of trucks. There were not that many train carriers around, and one of my uncles, Jack Robbins, started the trucking division. So we carried almost all of our own freight. I think at one time we had 70 tractors and trailers.
So hauling freight became a pretty big business in itself. Before that it was all regulated. The U. One guy could buy a truck, and he could undercut you. It was a real benefit because we would tell people our own employees would deliver the furniture.
We deliver. It was a real benefit to us to have the trucking fleet. Was it six weeks? Eight weeks? There was really never a thought that the manufacturer would carry all this inventory as we do today. It was ingrained that they had to carry at least a day supply in their own stores. A- America's products are focused in value priced solid wood dining tables, chairs and master suites. Simplicity Sofas.
Copeland Furniture. Johnston Casuals. They have proven to be an ideal parent company for Kincaid. Wade Kincaid was posthumously inducted into the Furniture Hall of Fame in Kincaid as a boy's name is of Celtic origin, and the meaning of Kincaid is "battle leader".
About Kincaid Furniture of North Carolina. For four generations, Kincaid Furniture has been built on a philosophy to make wood furniture in its most natural form; using Solid Wood construction.
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